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Sunday, 20 July 2014

The next English Heretic release, The Underworld Service is due for release at the end of August. Over 70 minutes of new music. The Underworld Service is a holiday in Hades. It subverts the bouffant intellect of Melvyn Bragg culture and celebrates the hard hitting documentary investigations of World In Action. The Underworld in our vision doubles as an hermetic process. We look at the eschatological warnings of the fabled alchemist Fulcanelli and follow his trail from a church in London to the irradiated coasts of Suffolk. The living dead are unearthed in the beautiful limestone ravines of the Peak district and traced to their necromantic origins in the Black Temples of Atlantis. We bathe in the enolic mornings of Malcolm Lowry, Under The Volcano, inside a giant mausoleum. Informed by the work of James Hillman, English Heretic undertake a series of Katabases: ritual descents and movements towards the seas of the unconscious.

Musically, we scan a waveband of Corpse Oriented Rock, Philosophical Stoner, Field Trip Hop, Horror Folk and Funereal Disco . Radio broadcast from Tartarus, no matter what station you tune into, where every song, news report and culture show reminds you of your own mortality and the hermetic ciphers embedded in pop culture. Music genre as a form of word play, honouring the cabalistic punning tradition of Fulcanelli.

Inside The Mausoleum

In honour of the katabatic alcoholic tragedy of Malcolm Lowry. The track began with an improvisation carried out inside De Grey's mausoleum near Clophill in Hertfordshire. It's my argument that fictions should start at the point of death. Lowry's Under The Volcano is an example par excellence of this process. The track evolves into an evocation of an hermetic journey, a paean to the universal solvent of inebriated lyricism. The situationists paid homage to Lowry by carrying a series of psychedelically informed derives to the Paris suburb of Sarcelles. They were high on mescalin at the time. Sarcelles by a curious coincidence was the location of the alchemist Fulcanelli's legendary transmutation in 1922.

River Of Black Rams Blood

Kereyni's description of Hades re-imagined as the main theme to a Greek horror film. The track was composed from snippets of "Land of the Minotaur" theme together with field recordings from a corpse road at Walsham Le Willows in Suffolk. As I recorded the church bell peels, a child could be heard playing on a swing in a neighbouring garden. The creaking of the swinging was oddly melodic and when processed back in the studio created a perfect imitation of a folk rock flute riff. Vocal wise, Alan Vega or Andrew Eldritch (depending on your critical angle) down the Greek discotheque backed by an ageing English Lit. Professor – the types you'd meet on an horrific Mediterranean holiday.

Video Anxieties

This forms part of the research I've
being doing into constructing a private inner cinema. The track is an attempt to remap the locale of zombie Horror flick – Living Dead At
Manchester Morgue. This infamous video nasty set bizarrely enough in the Peak District, gives the film a gory beauty. Our interpretation is folk horror soundtrack part documentary of a
vaguely anxious travel guide, the dialogue abstracted from Living
Dead At The Manchester Morgue – to recast the script as a paranoid
holiday outing. A sinister documentary element is added by
an Italian voice over reading an extracts from Kenneth
Grant's Nightside of Eden, In Nightside Grant makes the
claim that the Altantean Priesthood employed sexual necromancy in their the
creation of zombies. Hardcore horror and hardcore occultism meet in the mid 70s.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

Horror folk. The song is
a traditional Derbyshire ballad concening the
infamous Winnat's Pass Murders. Sound affects are taken from
Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue, of the zombies' curious
gurgling sound. Director George Grau based the sounds of the zombies on his memory of hearing his own father's death rattle.

Transmutation At Sizewell B

The Greek concept of the Katabasis –
a ritual descent – can also mean a journey toward the sea. The
track is derived from recordings made during a serendipitous katabatic
journey toward the Suffolk coast. The journey began
at the infamous Blythburgh church (where the devil is said to have visited in
the middle ages). While there, we recorded a local choir were rehearsing Office
Of The Dead. We then drove to Sizewell B and recorded the ambience,
to be later processed into an imaginary geiger counter sound. The
lyrics come from the final chapter of Fulcanelli's Mystery Of
Cathedrals. Mystery of Cathedrals is an alchemical warning against the
misuse of atomic chemistry. Most curiously, opposite the entrance to
Sizewell B, is a pub called the Fulcan Arms. The
pseudonym Fulcanelli is thought to be derived from the name for
the Roman God of fire and forge – Vulcan.

The Pherenikos
Philosophical Stoner Rock: in which we tackle the ancient veneration of the severed head in the figure of the Gorgon contrasting feminine tenderness with US servicemen's abuse of VietCong in the process of trophy skull adornment. The track that exposes heavy riffs whilst also considering serious gender issues encompassing religion, war and masculinity.

The Alchemist Of Saltdean
An extract from an interview with south coast hermeticist - Haunted Shoreline

Peregrine
Field Trip Hop - the predatory cousin of Fleetwood Mac's Albatross - A setting for a reading from J.A. Baker's shamanic nature book, The Peregrine.

Invisible Canon

The piece began with two field recording on a visit to Hiroshima. The first, the sound of the thousands of cicadas near the ruin of the Atomic Dome, the closest surviving building left standing after the bomb. The second field recording taken on video on my Cannon camera was of myself striking the peace bell.

The piece includes the choir of Gyuto monks. This was inspired by a dream recounted in Michael Horwitz Hill's book Dreaming the End of the World in which one of his subjects experiences a nightmare where sound of B52 bombers has been replaced by a choir Gyuto monks.

For the structure of the piece, I wanted to create a track in the style of apocalyptic DJ Shadow - DJ 'Falls The' Shadow - a reflection on an incredible exhibit in the Peace Museum at Hiroshima. The museum contains the steps of a local bank with the shadow of a body, evaporated during the explosion: the most haunting and violent sculpture, one can imagine.

Operation Wandering Soul
The early 70s as the underworld, a report on the documentary roots of Apocalypse Now. A homage to ITV's World In Action and its expose of rebellion in the ranks of U.S grunts and the use of sound warfare to create imaginary Viet Cong ghosts. Operation Wandering Soul was conceived in the echo chambers of the US military.

The Underworld Service
A unique new music service: English Heretic Music Thanatology ®. The first prototype will be used on the death bed of English Heretic. We have identified a market for a more edgey listener who would like something more terrifying than the platitudinous harps of conventional Music Thanatology practices.